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Microsoft Is Talking About Acquiring GitHub, Says Report (zdnet.com)
The Welcome Rain shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft officials have been talking to GitHub about possibly acquiring the company, according to a June 1 report in Business Insider. BI claims that the two have discussed the possibility of an acquisition on an on-and-off-again basis over the years "but in the last few weeks talks have grown more serious." BI is citing unnamed "people close to the companies" as its sources. "This isn't as surprising as it would have been ten or more years ago," writes The Welcome Rain. "Microsoft is investing a lot in git, including GVFS, a Git Virtual File System to help Git work with very large codebases. What might this mean for the future of Github?"
A few years ago I would have said it is the end of GitHub. Now it is most likely to be turned into a zombie
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
It means it's time to migrate your projects and close your Github account.
Bill Gates wants to Merge Github into the master branch.
For those of us that work on VSTS based systems and like everything all together, this is actually bad news.
I LIKE the calmness of VSTS over GitHub. (Sure, for social / open development, GitHub is great. For private, within the organisation? VSTS is just plain calmer.) Problem is, there will be this push to use private GitHub for things that are just easier in VSTS. And, often, what is technologically the best isn't really what matters, it's what people are paying attention to.
Microsoft is a master in killing off good services and scaring away users by bad product management.
This has not been my experience in any way, shape, form, or manner.
Linkedin has become absolutely insufferable since Microsoft acquired them.
Came here to read exactly that type comment from slashdotters. Was not disappointed.
You're such a predictable bunch.
As a former Microsoft developer, I can tell you, this is a really bad idea. Microsoft internally has one of the best revision control systems I've ever used (Source Depot), so we know they won't use it, but they will control how source code is managed and he who controls the keys to the repository also controls the builds. I vote really, really bad idea. Start moving your projects back to SourceForge.
So, if Microsoft is ambiguous about how it intends to handle people's confidential projects / personal code repos, and someone "deleted" all their content and wants to leave, will that actually be deleted or available to Microsoft? Hm.
What an incredibly effective way to piss off a large set of developers! The early adopters of git obviously were non-microsoft devs. Just discussing this now will be seen as a very serious threat to most of that population subset. Just look at any other product MS has purchased over the years to see what happened to the linux (or non-MS) version 1-2 years after the purchase.
E.g., anyone had any trouble using Skype in Linux over the last year, versus 3-5 years ago?
How long would it take before access to github is integrated into VisualStudio, and how long after that will the command-line version of git start failing to pull/push/etc to github? "Pull must be performed from within VisualStudio Team Explorer. Command-line version of git is no longer supported. Please upgrade to VisualStudio 2020."
For Microsoft to be in charge of so much code is an existantial threat. The only thing worse if Microsoft takes over the Linux or BSD git repos or buys out the Wikimedia Foundation.
I have already said goodbye to Skype and Linked-In after they had been taken over.
If this happens, I would say goodbye to Github too for sure.
The users of Github are not sheep. They are not like Microsoft's typical users that would accept lock-in and clunky interfaces because they don't know any better.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
If Microsoft buys GitHub, I am moving all my code to GitLab or Bitbucket.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
SourceForge has an importer that will import your GitHub project https://sourceforge.net/p/forg...
QuarterDeck, OS/2, Xenix.
But Google kills off just as much. Remember the much-loved Google-Reader? Wave? Google-Talk?
I was a paying skype customer before MSFT.
I was a paying Nokia Maemo customer, before MSFT.
I was an early adopter for LinkedIn.
Cancelled my accounts in each, when Microsoft broke each of them.
It's also caused a problem for units in my organization that can't tell the difference between a public and private repository. They've uploaded api keys and other really sensitive secrets like database passwords. Dummies. I wouldn't post that stuff online even if I though the repo was private. I use my own servers for git. Like a real man (or woman) does.https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/01/2034202/microsoft-is-talking-about-acquiring-github-says-report#
Not a chance. I remember when Sourceforge was a decent place. Now? Slathered in ads, ads in the downloads, those hideous add-ons in the downloads. Honestly, CVS is still sane, despite being old. OpenBSD still thrives there, as do many, many others. GitHub, while not "new" is still the new shiny for so many coders. I keep my code in my own private tree. I do commits, merges, etc., and keep my code to myself. Even the code I write for work has backup copies in my private tree if I leave. Code re-use, baby, code re-use. Anything worth writing is worth keeping. Since I primarily write tools for my colleagues, I may use them again at a later job.
It is definitely worse, I ignore it entirely at this point. I would also stop using Github for different reasons, just on principle. MS needs to slink off into the night and be happy with its monopoly on dumb users who need invasive IT support.
It's pretty easy to set up your own git repo... I don't understand why more people don't do it.
#DeleteChrome
I get that they don't have good code in VSO to train their self-programming AI's on (just a bunch of business code with shitloads of patchwork by lots of maintenance devs - a true mess.) I also get that they want to stick stuff into GitHub's EULA bypassing any open source license or patent rights for themselves when code is uploaded to GitHub. But not a fucking chance will I continue using it if that traitorous corporation of so-pc-they-actually-fire-entire-departments-for-being-"too-white" globalist h1b hacks buys it out.
"Has become"? When was LinkedIn not insufferable, with their constant reminder of contact requests that I was ignoring in the first place (and didn't want to log into their website to officially ignore)?
amen to that!
I'm pretty happy that I never left. sad to see the CVS/SVN repositories go, but nice that I can do sane binary releases for end users, and it not look like 21century ASS like github.
to see if any of it could be used to remove DRM.
It looks like your trying to share code that will circumvent DRM...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
“I am NOT a giant fish!” Oh, wait...
...that wasn’t the quote I was looking for. It can go about its business. Move along.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Once Microsoft bought it, Skype turned into the default business communication tool, but everybody else ran away.
If they buy GitHub, businesses will use it for their own development teams. But the rest of us will probably go to Bitbucket or elsewhere.
Just to be ready for MS' take over!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes
Like the 419'ers use illiteracy to shake out people who are insufficiently gullible, MS/LinkedIn use spam to shake out the kind of people who might have some resistance to advertising.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
R.I.P. Github.
aaaaaaa
Soon you will be able to login on github with the hotmail email account you created in the 90's... Gross....
In the event of Github selling out to Microsoft, I want to be sure I can download all issue discussion, wikis, and so on from my projects and then upload that information to a new service, say Gitlab. Could I get some people to suggest programs/scripts for accomplishing this?
Well since Stalin has been dead firba long time he tends not to cause problems anymire (mostly anyway) MRs Clinton on the ither hand,,, :)
Itâ(TM)s not that I dislike Microsoft, but itâ(TM)s recent track record, that includes Skype and Nokia, suggest that they are best to leave the good stuff alone.
Buying an important stake in GitHub would be fine, but having so much control they meddle with a good thing, no thank you.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Microsoft isn't the 90s Microsoft anymore. They're banking on getting out of the software business and into the cloud business. Every single project they build these days beyond core Windows and Office has at least some open source component and they're already using Github to host all their code. Owning Github would be a way for them to build an even more seamless bridge into Azure for developers' applications. It's already incredibly easy to publish something through VSTS and the other 10,000 CI/CD tools out there.
That's the interesting thing about this whole Azure shift...they don't care what you run on their service as long as you pay them to use it. And, they get guaranteed monthly revenue without having to craft enterprise software agreements. It's an interesting shift to watch, because they're trying hard to not publicly indicate any sort of lock-in while leading people that way. If you're careful about tool selection you can make a totally portable application, but Microsoft is providing enough services that are easy and the path of least resistance...but also happen to run only on Azure.
As for what they would do with Github...probably nothing beyond building stronger Azure connections. They're out of the software and the phone/App Store business for the most part, so we're back to Developers Developers Developers...
"It is impossible for the culture in MS not to destroy GH."
I think they'd just leave them alone. Microsoft wanted Nokia so they could make an iPhone killer and sell their software and app ecosystem. They wanted Skype so they could get a better video conferencing system for O365/Teams to sell more subscriptions. I think they want Github to drive Azure adoption. To make that work you can't just take them over and apply the old license-based software company culture. The open source crowd would never tolerate any change that smelled of "proprietary closed source code" so I think Microsoft knows they would have to basically not touch anything and just quietly build easy on-ramps to consume more Azure.
Github actually fits with their "new, hip web startup" culture they seem to want to cultivate. People I know who have worked there for a while say that the whole DevOps thing has come through like a freight train. Developers have been moved from private offices to cafeteria tables and they've basically fired all the testers and forced developers to write tests.
We use an on-premise enterprise edition of Gitlab.
I would love for MSFT to acquire Github, simply because a lot of developers who live in a world of "Everything and everyone is on github, get there already!" would finally wake up and enable their tools to integrate with other repositories. The one in particular that I have in mind is Ansible Galaxy.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
No, this is about licensing. Part of the new ELU wil be change to assume intellectual property rights from any project posted to GitHub. Micro$oft will own everything. Then charge for it's use.
Whenever I hear of MS acquiring a company I'm reminded of that Simpsons episode where Gates buys out Homer. It doesnt appear like that reputation has changed, even after all these years and changes in the company's management. I was an avid Minecraft player and enjoyed frequent additions to the game which kept me engaged. I was skeptically optimistic when MS acquired Mojang, hoping MS would positively influence development, but that didn't seem to come to fruition and updates are less frequent than ever. When I read that MS is increasing contributions/influence in open source I can't help to wonder what their actual motivation is. Then I'm reminded again of that Simpsons episode.
I'll be gone. That's what it will mean.
Or they could rewrite the code from scratch. But that doesn't matter, because, as I pointed out at some length, nobody is locked into Github, and if they try to replace the protocol it speaks, projects will simply move somewhere else where git still works.
(And VS will have to continue to support regular git because of the many critical projects that aren't hosted on Github, or that would move off of Github if Github became MS-only.)
The only reason people use Github is because it's convenient and has a large community. Trying to turn it into something MS-specific would make it less convenient and reduce the size of its community (and give a huge boost to projects like Gitlab). If they wanted a proprietary VCS, they could have simply stuck with SourceSafe (or whatever it was called--I haven't used any MS products in decades).
This. Unless MS wants to drive users away...